141–150 of 405 posts
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I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/
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You use AI to write your blog?
yes, for example this article including charts and summaries were generated by AI. https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a direct writer with cursor now replacing word
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…
The Gemini protocol, which has been posted here recently, is pretty good for reading personal and niche blogs. Yes, yes, I know you don't need Gemini for this, it is entirely possible from a technical perspective to host a minimalist personal blog over HTTP. But a great thing about Gemini is that there really isn't that much else on there, so the signal to noise ratio is higher. I check gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/…
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…
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Having everything you make stolen and fed into the AI machine absolutely is a good reason not to create anything useful. Or at least a good reason not to post it online
I don’t think it’s a good reason. I think it’s a reason. It’s certainly demoralizing. Plagiarism sucks and feels bad. If I were to google something and see the AI overview parroting my blog post, sort of almost kind of paraphrasing my words and shoving the link to my actual blog off the phone screen entirely, I think I would personally travel to google headquarters and start swinging a baseball bat. But… For starters…
This is the only sensible reaction to the abuses that huge tech companies are dumping onto society.
I do agree half heartedly with what you are saying. Making our own stuff and seeking out human-made stuff is more important than ever
It's just demoralizing because it is now also more difficult than ever. It should be the norm, not the exception imo and to me the future looks bleak and soulless.
AI scrapes niche blogs, Google deranks or spam drowns them out. It's really not a good time to be starting niche blogs.
And further, the LLMs will DDOS you in the process, completely disregarding robots.txt, so self-hosting is a pain-in-the-ass, forcing you to use (and trust) something like Cloudflare (or the Anubis, or Kiwiflare).